First Love (2019)

First Love (2019; Hatsukoi) combines a couple of my favourite sub-genres: One Wild Night and Multiple Parties Want One Thing. Directed by the prolific Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike (13 Assassins, Blade Of The Immortal), we follow a young boxer Leo (Masataka Kubota) who goes from shiftless to despondent when he receives some bad news after […]

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Sad Keanu before the meme. Robert Downey Jnr in prime bursque rant mode pre-MCU. Woody Harrelson as hippy-dippy paranoid (naturally). Winona Ryder as subtle and caring from afar. Rory Cochrane taking his Slater character from Dazed And Confused to another deeper, darker, depressing level of Too Far Gone. A Scanner Darkly (2006), an adaptation of […]

Alphaville (1965)

My enduring memory of Alphaville (1965) was the shot near the end of a Parisian freeway at night, the collection of lights in the darkness, a simple and low budget way of implying a future space. To travel to another galaxy as mundane as driving down a highway, yet still otherworldly in the grainy black […]

The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

Movies about virtual reality and the internet envision worlds within worlds – levels, Jerry, levels. So it is with movies about VR: The Matrix is at the top level, being a critical and commercial success that still stands the test of time. Then you have the next level, films like Dark City, which weren’t box […]

eXistenZ (1999)

Continuing the cyber-punk run I’m on by firing up a rewatch of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), which is up there with Dark City with cult movies overshadowed by The Matrix’s box office success. Pre-millennium video-game inspired noirish narratives about the nature of reality and its confusion with fiction; the type with strong fans who will […]